Dark Tort (12 page)

“I know, I know. But I was happy for Charlie to make all that money, even if he had an awful short time to spend it. Once he got that diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, all the money in the country couldn’t help him.”

“Such a bummer,” Julian agreed.

“So I want to get his recipe right. This time, anyway.”

Julian nodded. I added half the dry ingredients to the sugar and butter, stirred carefully, poured in the cider, then tipped in the rest of the dry ingredients.

“Looks awful thick,” Julian mused.

“Like cement.” The biceps and triceps in my arms were nowhere near equal to the task, so Julian took over while I buttered the pan. “Sometimes coffee-cake batter is really thick,” I said hopefully. “Cookie batter, too, and both of them turn out moist and great.”

Julian scraped the batter into the pan and slid it into the oven. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands.

“Oh God, Julian, I’m sorry. You want to go up and rest?”

“No, boss, it’s not that. It’s . . . It’s Dusty. I mean, I hadn’t seen her too much over the past couple of years—almost three years, I guess, since I started college. We broke up when she was . . . well, seventeen, I guess. But we always got along after that. I mean, we were friends. I just . . . imagined she’d always be there, you know?” He exhaled. “You really don’t think that kids you went to school with are going to be murdered.”

“I know.” I sat down beside him. “I’m sorry. Wink’s going to be a wreck, too.” Julian rubbed his face. “She and Dusty were such great buds. I can’t imagine what she’s feeling right now.”

“This is so bad.”

I murmured comfort while Julian ran his hands through his short, dark brown hair. Julian had first come into our lives with a bleached-blond Mohawk haircut, and an over-the-top hostile attitude. He’d gradually become an indispensable part of our family, inspiring Arch with his dedication to swimming and studying, inspiring me by being a genius in the kitchen, and gradually dropping his chip-on-the-shoulder to wrap all of us in a stubborn, bearlike affection. Yet like Arch, he now felt desolate and guilty.

I peeked in at the cake, which looked as if it was shrinking into a hard sponge. I muttered a curse under my breath. Julian looked in the oven and shook his head.

“Just make a regular butter cake,” Julian said. “Trust me, Goldy. Nora Ellis will never know the difference.”

“Yeah. But what if, one day, she decides she wants to cook? And if she tries to make Journey Cake and it flops, she’ll ask me why I didn’t use her recipe, and demand her money back.”

“She might ask for her money back, yeah, but she is much too tied up with shopping, manicures, and talking on the phone with her girlfriends ever to want to cook, or ever to bake a cake. Why is this recipe so important, anyway?”

“Because it’s on the painting. Have to say, now I’m really curious to know if Charlie screwed up this recipe, or if Nora did when she copied it down. But I don’t know where I’d get another recipe from Charlie Baker to test.”

Julian bit his lip, deep in thought. “Wait a sec. Don’t you remember when we did that fund-raising spaghetti party for the football uniforms at Arch’s new school? Turns out, Charlie Baker was an orphan who went to the Christian Brothers High School, back when it was an orphanage. He gave them a bunch of his paintings, and they’re hanging in one of the halls. Didn’t you see them? I just glanced at a couple on the way to the men’s room. What caught my eye was the one for Asparagus Quiche.”

“Oh, man, now I’m really curious. Let me phone the school.”

I put in a call to CBHS, where an obliging secretary said they were asked for Charlie’s recipes all the time. They’d put together a leaflet that they sold for five bucks—payable to the Football Boosters—to anyone who wanted one. I asked the secretary about the quiche, and if she’d heard of Charlie’s Cake Series. Maybe I or II? She had no idea what I was talking about.

“But we’d be very happy to sell you a booklet,” she sang out. “We keep them in with his paintings, so people can see the real thing if they want. We had to move them out of the hallway,” she said, her voice suddenly morose. “They got too valuable to keep them hanging between the lockers.”

I thanked her, hung up, and stared at Nora’s card again. “I still think Nora could have copied it down wrong. Perhaps Charlie was getting addled toward the end of his life.”

Julian shrugged. “It’s more likely Nora screwed it up. If the CBHS secretary doesn’t know about Charlie’s cake recipes, then let’s just make ‘Old Reliable.’ ”

“That’s a possibility. What would I do without you, Julian?”

“Fall apart,” Julian muttered, but then he smiled as he removed the hard disk of fallen cake from the oven.

I was taking out more butter and eggs when the doorbell rang. When I looked through the security peephole, I saw Nora Ellis, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, looking perfect in a herringbone blazer and black pants, standing next to Ookie Claggett, wife of Alonzo Claggett, aka Claggs. Ookie, a muscled, short-haired brunette, was always dressed for squash. Today, despite the fact that it was now October, she wore white shorts and a white T-shirt with the logo of Aspen Meadow Country Club. She was even carrying a squash racket, which she lofted and waved at the peephole.

My heart vibrated in my chest as I opened the door.

“You need help?” Julian yelped from the kitchen.

“No, thanks.”

“Hi there,” I said as I slid out onto the front porch. I certainly did not want to precipitate another conflict between Julian and Nora Ellis. “We’re working inside,” I stammered, “so things are a mess and I can’t . . . well, you two probably heard about the . . . death at H&J this morning.”

“Oh, heavens,” said Ookie, tapping her racket on her thigh. “We did. That poor girl.”

I couldn’t interpret her tone. According to Marla, who kept track of such things, Nora Ellis and Ookie Claggett had a love-hate, gossip-dependent, ultracompetitive friendship. I addressed Nora. “Under the circumstances, Mrs. Ellis, Nora, I . . . didn’t think you’d want to go ahead with—”

“My husband’s birthday party?” Her voice was querulous as she brushed the curtain of platinum hair back from her fine-featured face. “Well, I don’t know what to do, actually. He’s a mess. Everyone at the firm is.”

“Well, um, you might want to ask him about the party. It’s possible he’ll think it . . . wouldn’t work.”

“I know,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn’t go ahead with it. Still, I think everyone desperately needs cheering up.” She hesitated. “Were you able to make the cake?” she asked.

“I’m working on it right now. Actually, just double-checking here, but do you still happen to have that list of ingredients?”

“Why, yes,” said Nora, surprised. While Ookie sighed and rolled her eyes and indicated this was a huge waste of her time, Nora dug around in her Prada bag until she found an index card. “Do you want to just take this?” she asked.

“No, I’ll copy it, thanks.” I excused myself, wiggled back through the front door, and returned with my own index card and a pen. Nora proceeded to read me the exact list of ingredients we’d already used. “Are you set now?”

“Absolutely,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt.

“All right, then, I will check with Donald,” she said as she and Ookie turned to go. After a moment, she added, “Everyone is going to be so upset, if we do go forward. Maybe you need some help.”

“No, thanks, I’m fine—” I began.

She lifted her chin and shook her blond hair in a gesture of impatience. “Tell you what. If Donald is okay with us having the party, then we’ll do it.”

“Uh, when you make a decision, I just need to know as soon as—”

But Nora and Ookie were already walking toward a black Hummer.

When I returned to the kitchen, I slapped my index card on the counter and told Julian the content of my conversation with the two associates’ wives. He raised his eyebrows, as in I told you so.

I eyed the shrunken Frisbee of cake, then checked my new index card with its list. The ingredients were the same. “To hell with Nora’s cake. Let’s whip up Old Reliable.”

“That’s the spirit.” Julian began creaming the butter while I assembled the dry ingredients. During my years at boarding school, Old Reliable had been a staple of our bake sales. To buy new sticks for the field-hockey team or fund a field trip to Chancellorsville, the day students would bring in platters of cookies and cakes that we boarding students would then slice and sell after lunch. I had a vivid memory of girls carrying paper napkins topped with huge slices of tender yellow cake that had been slathered with chocolate buttercream icing. Those Southerners knew how to cook, I’d give them that. Maybe our school bake sales weren’t on the level of some of the fancy fundraisers we did at St. Luke’s Episcopal, but the principle of “You Can Eat Blamelessly if You’re Raising Money” was identical.

If we did indeed cater Donald Ellis’s birthday party, I would need to double the ingredients, I realized, as I printed out my old recipe. I worked the math and wrote up the proportions, then handed the paper to Julian to make sure I’d done it right. He recalculated the ingredients and found I’d only failed to double the baking powder. Agh!

“You’re distracted,” Julian said encouragingly. “I can’t believe you’re trying to . . . well, I can believe it, given everything you’ve told me about that law firm. Let’s boogie on this cake so you can pick up Arch and Gus on time.”

I sifted the dry ingredients, then creamed the sugar into the butter while Julian separated eight eggs. Julian rarely complained, and he took to his tasks with determination, eyeing each yolk and white carefully to make sure none of one mixed in with the other. Working with him in the kitchen was like skiing with someone you’ve known forever. He goes one way, you go the other, and no one skis over anyone’s toes.

We put the cake pans into the oven and observed the batter’s progress through the glass, as anxious as parents watching their own kid ski down a slope for the first time. But the cake rose beautifully, and emerged puffed and golden.

After we’d placed the pans on racks to cool, Julian frowned at Charlie’s cake recipe, or rather his recipe for cake failure.

“It really was not like Charlie to do this incorrectly,” Julian said, his voice stubborn.

“Well, let it go for now. Julian? Sally Routt has asked me to look into Dusty’s death. Just tell me, how did Dusty seem to you, when you were going to school together? I mean, was she friendly, standoffish, smart, not so smart, what?”

Julian turned, leaned against the counter, and folded his arms. After a moment, he said, “She was smart, yeah. I mean, Elk Park Prep gave her a full ride, until everything fell apart.”

“We’re talking about before the Routts moved in across the street.”

“Yeah.”

Julian pointed to the espresso machine and raised his eyebrows, as in How many shots? I thought, To hell with my doctor, and said, “A couple. With some cream, if you don’t mind. Thanks. Whenever I do get to bed, I’m going to sleep no matter what.”

Julian’s sneakers squeaked as he moved quickly around the kitchen to fetch demitasse cups, whipping cream, and to refill our bowl of sugar, which he had emptied. He pulled the shots, doused mine with cream, and placed the cups on the kitchen table. I sat down and, as usual, averted my eyes as he proceeded to ladle obscene amounts of sugar into his coffee. Why did he have such perfect teeth? I wondered.

“What do you mean,” I prompted him, “until everything fell apart?”

“Okay,” he began, after taking a preliminary slurp, frowning, and dumping in another dose of the sweet stuff. “You have to remember, this was before teachers started being held accountable if they had sex with students. It’s hard to think of a time when the student got blamed, but that’s exactly what used to happen. Anyway, that’s certainly what went down at Elk Park Prep when Dusty had an affair with the drama teacher, Mr. Ogden. Ogden was totally pathetic. He kept moaning about how his acting career was being foiled because his wife was so jealous of the time he spent on his work. Everybody felt sorry for him. Or at least, the girls did.”

My stomach churned, and it wasn’t from the espresso, which was actually excellent. Men could be just as manipulative as women, thank you very much.

“Nobody felt sorrier for him than Dusty,” Julian went on. “And then she got pregnant, even though Ogden told her he’d had a vasectomy! Dusty told me later that she really had thought Mr. Ogden would leave Mrs. Ogden and be with her, but forget that. Next thing anyone knew, Ogden was going to the headmaster, claiming Dusty was a slut who was falsely accusing him of fathering her child, which he could not have done, because he’d had that vasectomy. And also, Ogden insisted, Dusty needed to be expelled because she was with child, and that had violated the terms of her scholarship.” Julian finished his coffee and made a face. “Anyway, that lily-livered son of a bitch headmaster did expel her. Ogden’s version of the story came out in the papers. You didn’t see it? Dusty had falsely accused a teacher of impregnating her, blah, blah, blah.”

“No, I never saw that. Poor Dusty. Couldn’t she have insisted on a paternity test?”

Julian held up a stubby finger. “While Dusty was studying for her GED, she had an early-term miscarriage. This was while the Habitat house was being built. Then Dusty’s family moved in across the street from you, and she started to work for Mignon Cosmetics. She was determined to put Ogden behind her, and she became really focused on getting ahead, being ambitious. Remember?” I nodded. “After another cosmetics company hired her, she thought she was on her way up, but that cosmetics company went belly-up. So then Dusty got her associate’s degree down at Red Rocks. It just took her eighteen months, if you can believe it. And then Dusty’s uncle, Richard Chenault, joined the law firm in Aspen Meadow, and felt sorry for his niece. Supposedly. Anyway, he hired her and is paying for her tuition bills at the Mile-High Paralegal Institute.”